George Monbiot

In his book "Feral," George Monbiot advocates the large-scale restoration of complex natural ecosystems.

Why you should listen

In summer 2013, journalist and campaigner George Monbiot published Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea and Human Life. Part personal journal, part essay on natural science and wildlife (and on our own wild side), the book follows Monbiot's efforts to re-engage with nature. He shows how, by restoring and rewilding our damaged ecosystems on land and at sea, we can bring wonder back into our lives, and lays out a new, positive environmental vision, in which nature is allowed to find its own way.

After studying zoology at Oxford, Monbiot worked for the BBC’s natural history unit, making investigative environmental programs, one of which won a Sony Award. He left the BBC to spend six wild years in the tropics. Investigating the Indonesian transmigration program, he walked and canoed across West Papua, becoming lost in the forest, eating insects and rats to stay alive and being stung almost to death by hornets. Investigating evictions in Brazil, he was beaten up by gunmen and nearly shot by military police. The radio program he made about his encounter with a police torturer in Maranhão was used for several years on the BBC’s health and safety training course - as an example of what not to do. Back in Britain, he founded the landrights campaign The Land Is Ours and started writing columns for the Guardian. His other books include Amazon Watershed, Captive State, The Age of Consent and Heat.

More news and ideas from George Monbiot

The stars of your favorite TED Talks have been busy over the past week. Below, a few newsy highlights. Inside the mind of a murderer. What makes murderers do what they do? A BBC piece revealed that some murderers have reduced activity in their prefrontal cortex, which controls emotional impulses, and over-activity in their amygdala, […]

Wolves will travel to drink from a river. But could the presence of wolves lead a river to change its behavior? In his TED Talk, George Monbiot poetically explains how reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone National Park after a 70-year absence set off a “trophic cascade” that altered the movement of deer, sent trees soaring to […]

George Monbiot begins today’s talk by recalling a time he was “ecologically bored.” “We evolved in rather more challenging times than these, in the world of horns and tusks and fangs and claws,” explains Monbiot, an investigative journalist who found himself deeply dissatisfied returning to the United Kingdom after years reporting in the tropics. “We […]